Amazon Data Center Project To Restart

Construction on Amazon.com's boarded up data center in Boardman, Ore., will restart in the "not too distant future," according to a report from KEPR, a local TV station. If all goes as planned, the project will be completed in the third quarter of 2010, say local authorities.The TV station sent a crew out to the Amazon site at the Port of Morrow, a 9,000-acre industrial park along the Columbia River that's about 160 miles east of Portland. The news clip provides a good look at Amazon's half-built data center.

Port of Morrow general manager Gary Neal, in an interview with KEPR, says that the data center project is expected to start in the "not too distant future," and he gives a target completion date of 3Q 2010.

InformationWeek first reported that Amazon's data center had been put on hold, after I made a trip to the facility while vacationing in the area in August. See, "First Look At Amazon's Data Center."

KEPR's headline on the story is "Boardman Data Center Put On Hold." The real news uncovered by the TV station, however, is that the project is about to restart, with a completion date 8 to 11 months from now.

One other point of clarification: KEPR says that Amazon hasn't confirmed ownership of the data center, but in fact the company did so with me. Vadata Inc., the company associated with the project, is a legal entity of Amazon.

Amazon hasn't said why it's building the data center, but the company's fast growing cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, probably has something to do with it. This chart by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels shows the rapid growth of S3, one of Amazon's cloud storage services.